


Of Comedy and Confusion

by MermaidMayonnaise



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Squip, ComedyWriter!Michael, M/M, So you know "Hello Mellow"?, art in ch 4, famous!michael - Freeform, yeah it's nothing like that
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2019-08-29 11:32:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16743193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/MermaidMayonnaise
Summary: Jeremy led a relatively boring life."Hey, Michael," he said. "Wouldn't it be cool if one of us was, like, totally famous?"Michael choked. "Sure, that'd be great. But obviously I wouldn't know anything about that."-----------------------------------------Where Jeremy's a dumbass and Michael's both a liar and a famous comedian.(This used to be called "Of Flowers and Feelings.")





	1. Exposition

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's back!

In hindsight, if Michael knew what would happen, he would have probably thrown up his hands in mock surrender and stalked away angrily. It wasn’t fair. Life isn’t fair. But stuff happens. Shit happens.

And one day that very same shit hit the fan.

The day began as a cliche- that is, it began just like every other normal day. His alarm clock began to beep obnoxiously at precisely 6:10 AM, just like every day. Covering his eyes, Michael stretched out an arm to swat at it, just like every day. He angrily the alarm clock across the room, just like every other day.

Michael’s morning routine was very structured. After retrieving his alarm clock from wherever it landed, he dressed himself, and by dressing himself he meant picking a shirt and pants off his floor at random. His hoodie covered his shirt so it couldn’t be seen, anyway. Michael had very low standards, and the bar was set as ‘cleanliness’ and not a whit more.

After dragging himself to the bathroom, his clothes trailing behind him, he went through his sub-morning routine: the Bathroom Regimen. This included brushing his teeth and shaving, being careful not to nick his cheeks.

Can Michael just put in a side note about shaving? Having facial hair was a goddamned nuisance. It was scraggly when unkept and spiky if not. 

When Michael finally reached the age of puberty at the ripe old age of sixteen, it hit him like a bus and did very strange things to his body, which was not unlike actually being hit by a vehicle. Except that puberty usually had a positive end result, which car accidents did tend to have a certain negative aspect. Not that Michael would know.

One fateful day on the dawn on puberty, Michael felt the urge to eat. And not the crap he bought at 7-11, which included but definitely wasn’t limited to the sushi that hopefully didn’t transmit salmonella and the multicolored slushies that were most definitely filled with carcinogens. He wanted organic vegetables. He craved whole-wheat pasta. He salivated over salad.

His mothers thought it was a miracle. Michael just felt betrayed by his own body.

But he couldn’t admit that his constant of healthy food didn’t have benefits. Gone was the baby fat, the slight pudge around his cheeks and his hips. All his extra weight had gone into making him a giant. Michael towered above his peers now. He hated it.

His moms teased him mercilessly. Michael, who had always been a bit uncertain about his weight, needn’t have worried. By the grace of the human body and hormones, Michael’s fat was somehow transformed into muscle. To be honest, he had no idea how, besides that he ate less junk food and actually exercised (gasp!) three times a week. 

His mothers made him go outside, and Michael was bored, okay? He hoped it wouldn’t ruin his retro gamer vibe. Although it was always nice not to have to make multiple attempts to stand up. Doot doot de doot doot, to be healthy.

As the dear reader can probably see, Michael led a relatively boring life. He lived smack dab in the middle of Suburbia ft. Nowhere where the weary adults who worked 9 to 5 jobs in gray drab offices actually used phrases like ‘smack dab’ while old ladies shopping under the eternal fluorescent lights of the community grocery store offered screaming toddlers wrapped caramels from their salmon faux leather purses and everyone gossiped about everyone else and the neighbors always knew each other’s business. It was a typical white Jewish neighborhood.

Michael, being neither white nor Jewish, could not relate.

But he had a friend who could.

Enter Jeremy Heere in all his striped glory. Well, maybe glory was too strong a word for a guy that shuffled around like he was afraid of his own shadow and who somehow managed to trip over his own feet.

Despite Jeremy managing to make himself the fool in virtually every situation and acting the underdog in every other one, Michael was unabashed to admit (to himself, only to himself, no way Jose was he telling anyone else) that he had a massive, honkin’ crush on the guy.

Yes, he liked Jeremy. It was a fact of life for him, just like the fact that he was very much and indisputably gay and stanned Whitney Houston’s music. Were the two related? Were all three related? No one knew, least of all our dear protagonist.

That very same Jeremy was now stumbling over to Michael’s car, a half-eaten granola bar in his hand and a box of tissues in the other. Wordlessly, Michael pointed to the tissues and raised his eyebrow, having no idea what it was for.

Jeremy’s hand jerked on its own volition and lost its grip on the boc, which flew across the recently cut grass in a parabolic arc. “Aw, geez!” Jeremy gave a disgusted look at his hand, surprised. 

“Jer.”

“... What?”

“Was that what I think it was?”

Jeremy played dumb. “That depends what you thought it was.”

“Was the part of your... morning routine?”

“What morning routine?” he said, batting his eyelashes innocently, but failing so that it just looked like his eye was twitching.

“You know,” Michael said, awkward, but determined to make Jeremy feel more uncomfortable than him, “the--” and he made the universal motion for jerking off with his hand.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Doin’ the do. Taming the beast. Beating the meat. Herding the cattle. Milking the heifer. Folding the--”

“Be still, my beating meat,” Jeremy cut him off, partially because he’d been waiting for an opportunity to use that joke from Tumblr and also he didn’t want to know the end of that metaphor.

Realizing that he wouldn’t get a coherent answer from Jeremy without the latter turning red and stuttering, Michael pulled the car into drive.

The tissue box laid sadly in the yard as they drove away with the bangin’ music of the Score booming around them.

\-----------------------------

School was the same. School was always the same. Michael was sure that when Jeremy’s great great grandparents were in high school that the school still managed to look like the only things holding it together were the combined power of bullshittery and duct tape. 

Michael was what is known as a cynical romantic. This was a problem mainly because he romanticized things and then utterly destroyed them in his head an indefinite period of time later. School wasn’t a prime breeding ground for cynical romantics such as himself, but it provided the perfect conditions for douchebags and… yep, just douchebags.

He always scoffed at people when they said humans had complicated and complex personalities that couldn’t be pigeonholed away. He had two pieces of evidence, and he would now describe it to you in this complete, cohesive, and quality essay.

“Intro paragraph. Weird half-hidden pun. Hook.

Topic sentence, first example. Just take a gander at MBTI. Teenagers on Tumblr are into that kind of crap, but not Michael. Transition sentence.

Copied and paste topic sentence, edited to make it slightly different from the first. People could be categorized into simple groups. When  you’re one is referencing a work of literature, one always refers to the characters as ‘the jock’ or ‘the popular girl’ or ‘the nerd.’ It certainly doesn’t help that mainstream media is, in general, identical. But that’s a whole ‘nother plethora of essays. Vague self-referential comment. (The key was just to proceed with the essay as if nothing happened.)”

No, he had a simple and efficient philosophy. People could be put into three simple groups: douchebags, not douchebags, and utter douchebags. Chloe, Christine, and Dustin Kropp were examples of all three types, respectively.

Not that he’d intentionally pigeonhole Christine. She was too good for this world, even though she had flaws, just like every other normal person, and sometimes people didn’t like to acknowledge that. But everyone loved her anyway, because she had what his homophobic grandmother called ‘a beautiful soul.’ But Michael wouldn’t pay too much to everything else his grandmother said, because she was also racist and somehow sexist as well. It’s a miracle that his mother even came out of the closet in the same lifetime as that woman.

This was all part of Michael’s thought process as he rummaged in his locker looking for the school supplies that he needed that day. Michael had what his elementary school teachers liked to call an ‘overactive imagination.’ This didn’t offend Michael in the slightest because it was absolutely true.

Sadly, this tended to keep him inside of his head the majority of the time. People liked to describe Michael as distracted, sleepy and a general airhead. He couldn’t disagree.

His internal life was much more interesting than his surroundings, in his very modest opinion. In real life, people did very strange things like engage in small talk. Who even needed small talk? Just say what’s on your mind. You don’t have to fill up silences. Quiet lets the brain think. 

Michael could have gone into an entire rant about how daydreaming was actually beneficial for the brain and supported his claim with Einstein’s opinions, but that would have been another five paragraph essay that he wasn’t willing to write. Besides, it was more interesting to ponder in his head.

Jeremy was the same way. At the moment he was leaning against the locker next to Michael and scrolling through something on his phone, having already gotten his shit sorted out. 

“What’chu reading, Jeremy?” Michael was legitimately interested. Jeremy usually wasn’t addicted to his phone- his main outlet or way to get out of social situations was sketching in a notebook that he usually had with him.

Jeremy jumped, looking up guiltily. “Um.” He wasn’t too good with being jerked out of whatever he doing with little warning, which Michael could relate to. “I’m… reading?” Trying to escape from Michael’s scrutiny, he asked, “Did you get your stuff properly organized, you weirdo? Because I actually want to be on time to homeroom today.”

“I’m done, and I’m not weird for wanting to have things an exact certain way.” Michael slung his backpack over his shoulder. “But just so you know, I’m going to find out whatever you’re reading in about fifteen seconds once we sit down.”

They were both early enough that the homeroom was completely empty except for another antisocial headphones kid. Michael was pretty sure he was a transfer kid, but the dude always seemed to be sleeping so he didn’t want to disturb him, because that was what Jeremy described as a ‘big mood.’

Jeremy slumped over his desk, head in his arms. Michael copied him as he collapsed in his chair beside Jeremy, pulling the hood of his hoodie over his head and closing his eyes. They could go legitimately go to sleep like that. The back of their homeroom was where the stoners and slack-offs resided, so it was perfect for people like them. Additionally, it was relatively nice and quiet.

“So,” Michael said and Jeremy hastily averted his eyes, “what are you up to on that addictive little piece of technology of yours?

“Nothing, I told you! I’m just reading.”

“If you’re ‘just reading,’ then why are you carefully keeping your phone screen turned away from me?”

“No reason!” Jeremy yelped.

“Okay, now you just incriminated yourself. Hand it over.”

Jeremy held it out of reach by holding his arm out to the side and ensured his victory by sticking his tongue out at Michael.

He couldn’t have that. Michael wouldn’t be beaten by a twink approximately two thirds his size and half his weight.

And so it was no surprise that a small scuffle ensued between them. Michael, with his newfound muscles, won easily and held the phone up over his head triumphantly. Somehow they were both standing at this point, only emphasizing their height difference.

(Actually, Michael was wrong about the height difference. Jeremy was actually his height, almost exactly. Had he grown overnight? He was still a painfully thin skeleton, as always, but since when had he become Michael’s height again?)

And since they were now standing, and their lack of height difference was properly noted, the only reason that Jeremy couldn’t reach his phone was that Michael was somehow strong enough to hold his twiggy body back.

Somehow, the new kid was still sleeping through all of the racket. You go, kid.

“Give me my phone back,” Jeremy told him.

“No. Now, what are you reading?” Michael said, craning at the phone.

“Give me my phone back!”

“Hm… It almost looks like it’s--”

“Okay, fine! It’s fanfiction! I’m reading fic on a Tuesday morning of a school day, okay?” Jeremy sat back down in a huff, and Michael copied him.

Michael snorted derisively. “Fanfiction? Are you still reading this shit?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, unoffended although he was still obviously embarrassed that Michael could beat him in a physical fight. Or that’s what Michael assumed. “I found this super good story and I stayed up reading it.”

Michael knew that Jeremy had occasional flights of fancy where he got obsessed with different things for various periods of time. “What is it now?”

Jeremy turned his head so his face could mumble in Michael’s general vicinity. “So I found this new author…”

Michael laughed at him.

“Rude,” Jeremy yawned. “This author’s actually really good and I spent most of the night reading all of their work.”

“It’s fanfiction. How good can the author possibly be?”

“Okay, bitch,” Jeremy actually sat up straight, swaying slightly from fatigue, indignation, or maybe a combination of both. “Listen up. Authors do not have to be published to be good writers. Some of them are actually writers. Some aren’t-- and who cares? You know what? It actually doesn’t matter what their motivation is. What matters is that they’re actively creating and writing things they like.”

“Even if it’s kinky and obscure porn?”

“Especially that, even though I didn’t expect you to bring up that point so quickly.” Jeremy shook his bangs out of his eyes. “Without writers who do whatever the fuck they want, how would we have niche, obscure, and personalized things? Some people can be into weird tentacle porn or A/B/O.”

Michael’s eyes darted around their homeroom, which was gradually filling up with people. “You might not want to scream that.” Suddenly annoyed, he added, “And also, fics with Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics doesn’t just have to be weird animalistic sex. The trope can help explore the impacts of marginalized groups in society, such as reputation and their impact on groups and culture as a whole.”

“Wait, how do you know what A/B/O is? And I agree with you, but how did you know that?”

Michael’s eyes widened. “I will say nothing more.”

Jeremy clapped in glee but thankfully spoke quieter. “You’ve finally read some fanfiction, haven’t you? Oh my god, you’ve read smut.”

“I have not read smut!” Michael whispered fiercely. “I am thankfully past my thirteen year old Tumblr phase! I’m no longer cringy!”

Jeremy held up his pointer finger. “We’ll get back to pornography and the implications of you reading it online in a moment. For a moment I’d like to talk about cringe culture.”

“I’m imagining you standing on top of a stage with a button down, tastefully themed powerpoint, and a Ted-Talk sign behind you.”

“You’re literally the least helpful person I have ever met. Thank you.”

Michael tipped his hood in an imitation of a salute. “No problem, good sir.”

“So, cringe culture,” Jeremy leaned forward confidentially as miscellaneous students stumbled into homeroom with their various antidepressants and morning caffeine. “We as a teenage society need to get rid of that. Why does it matter if the things we like are outdated? Maybe somethings have already risen in popularity and have fallen down back into the pits of ‘washed up’-dom. 

People like who they like. Adults can like childish things. Kids can like FNAF. Artists can draw fanart for anime. Why should they be criticized by the common people? Their interests are real and valid, just like any of society’s mainstream ones. What the difference between  _ Riverdale _ and  _ Glee _ except a few years in execution?”

“Actually, a lot, but--”

“Hush, child. The point is that everyone’s interests should be held at the same rank.”

Michael tried again. “Well,  _ Glee _ is said to be cringy--”

“--Because it actually is, I know. But that’s only because of some of the mashups.”

They cringed together, and also mourned Cory Monteith for a second.

“So anyway, that rant was inspired by a--”

“Tumblr post.”

Jeremy looked crestfallen. “Oh yeah. You know it.”

“Nothing is original in this world anymore. Even your nice rants-- two of them before first period, that’s impressive-- weren’t original. Everything has already been said before. You just said it in a different way.”

The homeroom because slightly noisier as two girls, armed with their pink Louis Vuitton handbags and overapplied mascara, dragged in a potted plant that most likely had been sitting in one of their grandparents’ house for the past six decades. Why would two stereotypical teenagers lug a houseplant to a suburban New Jersey high school at 7:15 in the goddamn morning? The world may never know.

Was Michael’s point made? Or has that specific scene already been written before? The world may never know that as well.

“Let’s never bring this up again,” Michael said, referring to a conversation long in the past.

“Sure.”

“Okay.”

There was a moment of untrusting silence and then Jeremy narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You know I’m only agreeing to get you off my back, right? I’m totally bringing this up again when you least expect it. Ooh, maybe I’ll say it in front of Jenna.”

Michael paled. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me.” Jeremy squinted as they stared at each other straight-faced for two entire seconds before bursting into giggles. 

“We are a pair of cringy twelve years olds,” Michael gasped between laughs.

The room suddenly fell dead silent due to a lull in conversation from all fronts, only to be disturbed by Jeremy saying, “Damn right we are!” much too loudly.

“Mr. Heere! Language!”

“Jesus Christ, Ms. Kelly sometimes can have a stick up her ass,” Jeremy whispered, showing no respect for authority whatsoever. Only two years ago, he would have gone red and probably crawled under his desk in shame.

“I think the Internet has been a bad influence on you,” Michael told him. “Also, have you had Red Bull today?”

“Yes to both.” Jeremy’s eye twitched.

Michael handed him his morning thermos of tea and at Jeremy’s suspicious look stared unenthusiastically at him.

“We’re both dead inside, aren’t we?” Jeremy slurped cheerfully from the thermos.

“Yep, but you’re too hyped on 5-hour ENERGY TM to care.”

“That is absolutely true!” Jeremy said, not having to pretend to be tired anymore now that his secret was out. “And it’s kicking in right about now!”

“Why are you even taking stimulants?”

“Fanfiction! I stayed up all night reading, remember? And I just realized that you haven’t asked any specific questions about it, which is rude. We’re both supposed to at least at least pretend to be interested in each other’s hyper fixations.”

“Okay, fine,” Michael relented. “What’s their username?”

“Psh, you think I remember? It’s seven in the goddamn morning.”

“That it is,” Michael agreed as he slumped back into the warm comfort of his sweatshirt. “That it is.”


	2. This Time Around

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Instead of abandoning this story, I changed it. A lot. I'll quickly explain at the bottom of the chapter.  
> 1.20.19

Jeremy was in history class, which for some reason the school called ‘social studies,’ though what was social about sitting in class reading worksheets and learning about how old white guys had revolutionary ideas like, ‘Hey, maybe woman and POC should be allowed to decide things for themselves,’ he didn’t know.

That was boring, so Jeremy switched the tab on his open computer from his textbook reading, that he was supposed to be doing, to another tab, which he was not.

Jeremy had gotten into stand-up comedy recently. Since his recent escapades into Tumblr, his feed had always been flooded with trash, but there were some consistencies within the trash. He always thought of Sturgeon’s Law: ninety percent of everything is shit.

However, one consistency of the other ten percent of not-shit were screenshots with quotes captioned on them. These quotes belonged to a stand-up comedian called VintageAdage. Nobody knew what his name was, and he was disinclined to reveal it; he being the comedian. VintageAdage was relatively famous because of the specials he recorded and posted on his Youtube channel.

The videos didn’t have his face, they only included the album cover and the title of the bit. When he got relatively popular, VintageAdage had done his listeners a favor and captioned his videos with subtitles. The screenshots were basically just screenshots of the album cover and his subtitles.

VintageAdage had been relatively unknown for a year or two after he started recording bits, but his insane comedic genius had almost instantly brought him to fame as soon as he started advertising his stuff on Tumblr. A few key bloggers had found him, reposted some of his funnier videos and screenshots, and from then on it was history.

His popularity spread like wildfire over the Internet. Another unique thing about VinatageAdgae is that he sometimes illustrated his bits. Not an entire animation, persay, but just an image or two that pertained. His stick figures demonstrated almost of much of a lack of talent as his bits demonstrated the complete opposite.

As he became more and more well known among teenagers, adults started to take notice. His first official special, _I Should Have Stayed at Home,_ received critical acclaim for its inherent relatableness and insane quality of writing.

VintageAdage had started to be asked to perform onstage in front of audiences. However, in an audio-only interview, Adage claimed that he had debilitating social anxiety and could only perform in front of his screen.

“It’s just so much less pressure,” he explained. “People aren’t judging me for how I look or what I’m doing with my hands. They only hear my voice and what I’m really saying. I just think it’s a lot better for me this way.”

Jeremy knew all this because, sadly, he was a bit of a stalker. It wasn’t his fault! When he got obsessed with something, Jeremy _needed_ to find out everything he could. Therefore, he knew that Adage's favorite color was not red, as everyone at Adage’s school assumed, but “a vivid robin's egg blue.”

Jeremy could quote Adage to the letter. Sad? Sure. But listening to Adage was _so entertaining._

So that’s why he pressed in one earbud in the ear that was opposite the teacher so they couldn’t see that Jeremy wasn’t absorbed reading about Rousseau and Montesquieu’s political philosophies. Jeremy clicked on his bookmark of Adage’s channel that Jeremy had simply labeled “<3” and scrolled until he had found the album _Makes an Entrance._

 _Makes an Entrance_ was one of Jeremy’s favorites. It was about the awkward situations that Adage got himself into during his daily life. The bit that he was searching for was titled “This Time Around.” Jeremy clicked on it and settled back in his chair with a smile on his face as Adage’s voice filled his head.

There was an audible click as Adage pressed the button on his computer to start recording. Some papers were shuffled around the desk and Adage cleared his throat in the background as he moved the microphone closer to his mouth.

“Is-- is this working?” Adage mumbled to himself distantly, and some more bangs issued from his desk. His voice suddenly became much clearer. “Aw, shit, it was recording the entire time.” He addressed the audience. “Sorry, guys, I don’t have time to rerecord that intro. My moms limited my screen time last week, and I want to get as much of this recorded as I possibly can. I’ll delete this failure of an intro later. If I remember.”

Jeremy chuckled. This special was recorded before Adage had gotten famous.

“Anyway,” Adage continued. “How are you guys?” He paused, and there was only a faint buzzing. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Pretty much nothing goes on in my life either.”

“I have a little story for you guys. I made some notes on this--” a paper rasped against others as they were rearranged “-- but I’ve been trying to wean off reading from a script so I’m going to try improvising it. Here goes!”

He took a deep breath. “So I take AP Literature and Composition, which is a really fancy name for a class where the teacher stands in front of the class and talks about his college cross country experience.

“We’re reading _Othello,_ and for the plebians among you-- including me-- that don’t know or care what that is, it’s a play by Shakespeare. It’s pretty dry and dusty and therefore a classic example of college level literature.

“So the teacher, who shall remain nameless-- but let’s nickname him Vandy-- is discussing the book. Now, the thing that you should know about Vandy is he’s absolutely crazy. He’s the textbook definition of chaotic neutral. Now, this makes him sound bad, and he’s really not. It's just the crazy things that he says.

“People remember things that he has said in the past and quote him. One kid actually wrote down things that Vandy said throughout the year, shared the document online with tons of other kids, and dropped a printed copy on Vandy’s desk at the end of the year. The kid’s an idiot. Some of the things Vandy says aren’t… politically correct, shall we say, and Vandy got in a shit ton of trouble with the principal. He yelled at the kid, too.”

Adage laughed. “But all of that was just background information. Back to the class.

“Me and my classmates, all innocent juniors, are sitting in class, having read the book up to where he asked us to and ready to read and discuss the rest in class. We’re discussing the death of Desdemona, Othello’s wife.

“Oh,” Adage cut himself off, “this will have spoilers for the book. I’m sure it won’t disappoint you too much.

“Anyway. Through the novel, Othello has basically been manipulated to hate Desdemona, to the point where he’s like, ‘This is unacceptable! The only solution for her cheating on me is DEATH!’ And so, naturally, he strangled her with a pillow on their marriage bed. Because, if you’re going to murder someone, why not make it a symbolic death?

“Understandably, Des is all like, ‘No, don’t kill me!’ but in iambic pentameter, but like an unappreciative critic Othello doesn’t listen to her heroic couplet and kills her anyway. So after the deed is done, Othello’s standing there, breathing hard, and the feminist Emilia comes into the room and says, ‘Hey, what’s happening?’

“And Othello smugly says that he kills his wife, and Emilia retaliates with an ‘Oh, no, insert Shakespearean insult here, you’ve killed my friend!’

“And then Desdemona, who’s been dead until then, magically returns to life to say, ‘Oh, falsely murdered, falsely murdered!’ and then makes a little speech and then dies. The stage directions literally say ‘She dies.’

“So the class is busy laughing at that stage direction, and Vandy says, ‘Oh, that’s nothing. Wait until you hear what Othello says before he dies.’

“And the entire class goes absolutely silent. You know in those movies where suddenly there’s a slow-motion where everyone’s eyes comically open and their mouths go wide and they just go, ‘Nooooooo!’ That was our class.

“Vandy suddenly realizes that the class didn’t know that Othello was going to die at the end. Incredibly embarrassed and trying to salvage himself, he says, ‘C'mon, guys, it’s called _The Tragedy of Othello._ What did you think was going to happen?’ and some kid in our class called out, ‘Well, not that!’ as another girl yelled, ‘Yeah, we just thought he’d have gone to prison or something!’

“The class is in an uproar. You wouldn’t believe that this was about Shakespeare. People were hugging their sides and looking at each other in shock and astonishment. It was crazy.

“Vandy’s trying to get the class back under control, and eventually he does. Finally, everyone’s quiet, albeit a little bit scared, and they opened their books.

“Before Vandy started reading aloud, he said the kicker line of this bit.” Adage paused, trying not to laugh and chuckling anyway. “He said, offhandedly, like it was just something he wanted to throw aside, ‘Alright, guys, let’s get back on track, maybe things will be different this time around.’

“And the class exploded again, and this time students were crying actual tears. And that’s the end of this bit.

“Sorry if you guys don’t like literature jokes. It’s just that all the funny things that happen to me are school, so if you hear me making a joke about my chemistry teacher and pure sodium, just know that I’ll explain it to you first.

“This has been a time. VintageAdage, out.”

The video ended, and Jeremy paused the autoplay. He had been suppressing so many laughs throughout the bit that his entire body was shaking.

Michael leaned forward and tapped Jeremy on the shoulder. Jeremy, too absorbed in the bit, didn’t respond. Michael poked him more insistently, so Jeremy sighed and turned around to face him.

“What do you want?” Jeremy asked at the same time Michael said, “What are you watching?”

“I--” Jeremy started just as Michael said something. “Oh, you can go first.”

“I asked what you were watching.” Michael smiled. “Since you obviously can’t be smiling from what’s going on in class. The Enlightenment is fascinating, but not particularly humorous.”

“Oh. Oh!” Jeremy said. “I was listening to a stand-up bit.”

“It was fanfiction yesterday, and stand up comedy today?”

Jeremy laughed. “No, dork. I’ve been into comedy for a while.”

“How come I’ve never heard about it?” Michael stuck his bottom lip out as he pouted.

“Because you always make fun of my interests! Remember this morning?”

“Fanfiction is indisputably cringy,” Michael defended himself. “Anyway, I wouldn’t make fun of stand-up. I love comedy!”

That was new. “You-- you _do?”_

“It’s my guilty pleasure, I guess. I’ve really never told you about it!”

“Never!”

“Oh,” Michael shrugged. “Sorry, then. Anyway, who are you listening to?”

Jeremy smiled beatifically. “They don’t share their real name and only have a pseudonym, so I can only say that they call themselves VinatageAdage.”

Michael jerked in his seat. “S-sorry, what did you say?”

Jeremy looked at him, confused. Had he said something weird? “I said VintageAdage. Sorry, did I say adage wrong?”

“No, you said it right.” Michael’s face was suddenly very red. “I know who he is. I just, um, haven’t listened to anything of him.”

Jeremy’s eyes lit up. “You _haven’t?_ Oh, my god, he’s amazing. I think he’s literally a comedic genius. His bits are hysterical! The way he sets up the story and executes it is-- is a goddamn art!”

Michael looked like he was trying not to cough. His hand was over his mouth, and if Jeremy didn’t know better than he would have said that it looked like Michael’s mouth had dropped in astonishment.

“Quotes from his specials are all over Tumblr,” Jeremy continued, heedless of Michael’s impending death. “Aren’t you on Tumblr? I’m sure that you’ve seen _something_ of his. He’s praised like a god there. Gen Z has elevated him to a divine level.”

“Mmmhmm,” Michael said, his face carefully blank but still very, very red. “Never heard of him.”

“Hey, are you okay? You look like you’re repressing an aneurysm.”

Michael let out a strangled laugh. “No, no. I’m fine. I’m just surprised. You sound like you’re really into this guy.”

Jeremy smirked. “Yeah, he’s the one who made me realize that intelligence _can_ be a turn on. And he’s probably the one who turned me bi.”

Michael made a choking noise. “You and non-existent love life.”

“I am dating someone!” Jeremy protested. “It’s just one-sided and he doesn’t know I exist.”

Michael hid his face in his hands. “Oh, my god. My best friend’s dating a stranger. No, even worse-- a _comedian.”_

“In _love,”_ Jeremy corrected him. “We’ll be married as soon as I find out who he is. It’s a shame that he doesn’t reveal his name.”

“Why?”

Jeremy sighed. “He _says_ that it would interfere with his school life and he doesn’t want anyone to think of him differently because of the fame.” He leaned towards Michael conspiratorially. “But I think he’s just shy.”

Michael fiddled with the seam of his hoodie, eyes cast down. “W-why would you think that?”

“Maybe he has people in his life that would think differently of him, and he’s afraid of that.”

“Fair point. Like teachers and stuff?”

“Sure,” Jeremy pressed his fingers together, thinking, “Or maybe kids in his grade. He’s a high schooler, right? He probably doesn’t want the grade to tune in to when he posts a new special on Youtube and talk to him about it the next day.

“His stuff is pretty personal, maybe he doesn’t want the actual people he knows to judge him. Not to mention all of the teachers that he makes fun of, even though he does it anonymously. If the teachers knew who he was, that would ruin his chances of being liked by them since some of them would listen in to his podcast.”

“Oh. You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“Well, I _am_ going to be married to him.”

“What about consent and shit?”

Jeremy snorted derisively. “I’ll hit him over the head with a club and drag him away like a goddamn caveman. He’s too good of a catch to let him go loose.”

Michael’s face was so red that it resembled a fire truck.

“Hey, why do you look like you’ve eaten one of those ghost peppers like I dared you to do last year?”

“No reason.” The bell rang, and Michael leapt out of his seat and was out the door in a flash. “I’m going to be late to my next class! Big test! See you at the end of the day!”

Jeremy was left sitting in his seat with the rustling around him as the rest of his class packed up their supplies and each filed out in turn.

What was that about? Probably Michael was just super nervous for his test the next period. Jeremy had no idea.

* * *

 

This story was originally titled of "Flowers and Feelings." It was about Hanahaki!Michael who also writes fic. Jeremy's a fan, shenanigans ensue. However, I wasn't invested in the story, and abandoned it after the first chapter.

Then I got into John Mulaney. Like REALLY into him. Like being able to quote his specials to the letter.

I've been writing my own stand-up bits for a while, and I had no way to share them, and I suddenly thought, “Hey. Let’s just make Michael a comedian instead of a fic writer.”

And then the next chapter of “Hello Mellow” came out, a story who’s concept I adore, and this idea was born.

(I apologize for transforming OFAF into something else, but I lost interest and it would have been an abandoned story otherwise. I put the first chapter here simply I didn’t want to write another intro chapter. Just pretend that Jeremy’s a dumbass who can’t recognize Michael's voice, and ignore that the first chapter is from Michael’s POV.)

So that’s what this is! If you have any questions or want clarification for anything, hmu in the comments or on my tumblr mermaidmayonnaise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love feedback. Did the stand-up bit work, or was it too specific? I have a lot of other ones where prior knowledge generally isn't needed.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	3. Not What You Think

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "A Condom and a Misunderstanding"  
> In which I try to tell a story and accidentally divert into twelve others, resulting an end result that's 2/3 as long as the previous chapters combined.  
> 3.23.19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I took a break from comedy to watch the entirety of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but now that I caught up, I'm back!

It was some time later. Jeremy was at home doing (struggling with) his chemistry homework, so he wasn’t doing anything particularly important. His phone chimed with the theme song of the Apocalypse of the Damned, which either meant that Michael texted him or that VintageAdage released another Youtube video.

Any one of the two options was great. Michael hadn’t had a lot of free time the past week and he kept coming to school fatigued with his headphones on, saying that he was all worked out. That was okay. Michael worked at Spencers, and retail always took a lot out of a person.

Jeremy checked his phone, and upon seeing the Youtube notification, ungraciously swept all of his papers off his desk and slammed his computer on it. The textbook thudded to the floor as Jeremy’s hands flew over the keyboard, going to his bookmarks and finding the new video.

As he waited for the website to stop buffering, he got his headphones-- the good kush, the noise-cancelling gaming ones-- and plugged them into his computer with barely muted excitement.

Before he hit play, Jeremy left the very first comment in the comment section below.

_Who’sHereNotMe: I’m a simple man. When I see that you posted a new bit, I click._

Then he sat back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk, and closed his eyes.

* * *

What’s up, y’all? This is my newest update. Hold for applause. Yes, I stole that from John Mulaney. Comedians look up to other comedians.

What’s interesting about looking up to other people is that when you spend enough time observing someone, you start to become like them. You begin to pick up their queer little habits, like certain phrases they say and gestures they do. I’d give you an example, but I just did one with John Mulaney two seconds ago.

The problem with becoming too much like someone, though, is that you lose your own originality. I’ll give you an example.

I follow a very famous artist called Viria on Tumblr. Yes, I have a Tumblr. It’s just my pseudonym, vintageadage, because I wasn’t feeling incredibly creative when I created it. Plus, wouldn’t it be cool if I liked someone’s post and they recognized my handle? They’d be like, ‘Holy shit, it’s him, and then I’d make their day.’

It’s strange. I normally don’t care what people think of me, and to an extent, I still don’t. I just think that, in recent years, I’ve started becoming more aware of how I affect people. That reminds me of a story I read in Lit class a few days ago, I think it was called ‘The Drunkard.’ It’s a very funny short story, you should definitely check it out.

The gist is that Kugelmass, a fat bald Jewish dude-- I’m not being Anti-Semitic, my best friend is a Jew and I’d die for him-- that has everything in life and is bored, so naturally, he wants to cheat on his wife.  That was sarcasm.

Therefore, he goes to a magician named Persky that tells Kugelmass that if he gets in some sort of cabinet shit, that’ll transport him to any world in literature. Spoiler alert, which kinda isn’t because I’m pretty sure none of you know who she is, but he chooses Madame Bovary, a beautiful but very vain woman.

When Kugelmass travels into the story to have his affair, the book in reality is altered. The narrator interrupts several times to interject, “What he didn't realize was that at this very moment students in various classrooms across the country were saying to their teachers, ‘Who is this character on page 100? A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?’ A teacher in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, sighed and thought, Jesus, these kids, with their pot and acid. What goes through their minds!”

And, another gem, “‘I cannot get my mind around this,’ a Stanford professor said. ‘First a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she's [Bovary’s] gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new.’”

That last paragraph-- and you can hear me shuffling pages here-- is what I wanted to get to. Everything you do affects other people. Kugelmass, even with his excursions into the fantasy world, changed the lives of those reading it. Maybe that was the author’s purpose: to comment on your actions and their consequences. But what would I know? I’m just a high schooler writing my thoughts down in his bedroom.

The crazy thing is that even as I’m sitting at home, recording this, I’m affecting someone in some way, however miniscule.

It’s the Internet. Someone will find this, someone will listen to it. Everything from the shittiest trash to the pure gold content will be viewed by someone at some point.

I’m going back to my Lit class because, when I was writing this, I kept going back to it. I think I learn a lot more in that class than I do in my actual life experiences.

I haven’t actually been intentionally funny yet, although if you laughed anyway then that’s cool. Before I get to the bit that I actually planned on telling, I want to talk a little about humor.

My Lit teacher is funny. He’s incredibly sarcastic and witty and clever-- but in a dry way. He’s known through the school for it. The other day, he was talking about humor, as we’re in the midst of a humor unit. He said that it’s a shame that the curriculum doesn’t concentrate on humor, because it really is fun for both the teachers and the students, even though the humor is less fun to dissect. What I thought was interesting was that he said that we need to learn how humor works.

I started thinking about that and applying it to the stand-up specials that I watched. How do comedians set it up? How do they execute? Why? How?

I think I learned a lot, but then again I get off topic very easily, so I may have ruined this episode. Heh.

Vandy, the teacher, was talking about his old high school English class and he said-- and I’m quoting because I wrote it down, this is exactly what he said. He said, “It was a great English class. Now, if only I’d read some of the books.”

The entire class was understandably stunned. The man has a degree in English or Literature or whatever the fuck he went to college for. Vandy, understanding our surprise, said, “Oh, you didn’t expect that from your English teacher?”

Then he said the kicker line. He said, “It’s humor. Defiance of expectations is all that it hinges on.”

I was constantly in denial. No, I thought. It can’t possibly be that simple. Then I turned it over in my mind for the rest of the day, because the one thing I learned from studying ancient philosophers like Descartes is that you can only prove something true if you can find nothing that contradicts it.

I even had a conversation about it with a friend. She said that Vandy was correct, so I played the devil’s advocate.

“Why?” I said.

“You know those anti-jokes?” she said. “Even the really dumb ones, the stupidly simple ones, they get laughter because the answer is unexpected. It’s unexpected _because_ the audience expects that answers, but they learned from experience to expect something else, so when you revert back to the original joke it’s funny.”

My head started to hurt. “Can you give me an example?”

“What do you call a fish with no eyes?” she said. “Blind.”

“That was stupid,” I said intelligently.

“Don’t worry, I have another one.” She stroke a dramatic pose.  “Roses and red/ violets are blue/ some poems rhyme/ this one doesn’t.”

I couldn’t stop myself from giving an involuntary chuckle.

She pointed at me. “See?”

“Shut up. I’m ashamed that I laughed.”

Humor is the unexpected. That’s all there is to it. So why is it so goddamn hard to be funny?

I’m a terrible comedian in real life. I can’t do improv to save my life. I stutter and I tell the story in the wrong order or I lose interest partway through the bit and stop talking entirely .

That’s actually happened before. I was telling a joke in the car to my mother and the radio came on, so I just stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence because I lost interest. I just… trailed off. The story was boring anyway. My other parent actually piped up, “So what happened? I want to hear the end of this,” and to my own mother I said, “Well, I don’t.”

What was I saying? Oh, originality. Shit, I actually had to shuffle my pages _again_ because I went so off-track there. Ha! So, Viria, the internet artist.

She gets a lot of asks, which are exactly what they sound, and a lot of people ask how to improve their art. She always says to look and learn from other people, whether it’s from their art or their life. However, she always warns against using only one person as inspiration. In drawing and art, that’ll mean that your art style will evolve to become exactly like theirs, which become harmful to both them and the artist.

Instead, use ideas from different things. Take the techniques to draw eyes from one, a process of coloring from another. Everything’s a jumble of other things that’ve been done before, anyway. But in your case, you’ll have a nonsense patchwork, but it’s _your_ nonsense. That is what you can call your own style.

Everything’s applicable to your own life. I noticed that I’ve been listening a lot to one certain comedian and picking up his words and phrases and comedy structure. I think that that’s incredibly dangerous.

Not that I could ever become John Mulaney, because that’s obviously who it is. But when I make art, I want it to be my own. That way, I can be proud of it.

Now it’s time for the comedy bit. I titled it “A Condom and a Misunderstanding.” Before I start, I just want to say that I’ve been experimenting with structure. Oh, well. Hey ho, let’s go.

I’m a junior this year in high school. Last year I took a class called Math Analysis, which is another name for Precalculus. It’s an advanced class, and I took the honors level, which is known for its different curriculum. It’s one of the harder classes that I’ve taken.

A brief sidetrack. When I took the midterm, I studied for a max of three hours total the week before. I was incredibly stressed and focused on my other classes. I got to the assigned room with my class on the day of the midterm: dressed, stressed, and blessed. Hell, I don’t know what else rhymes with dressed. Compressed? Interest? Anyway.

We started taking the midterm. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a high stakes test in a room full of people in the middle of winter-- though this is America where standardized testing where the one score that determines your future reigns, so you probably have-- but it is _bad._

You’re crammed into a room with about twenty-five other people. The desks are far enough apart that it’s difficult to cheat but close enough together to hear every sniffle that the goddamn person in the adjacent row makes precisely every seven seconds.

When the test starts, there’s an intense shuffling as students hunch over their desks like elderly people and start flipping through the packet. A few minutes pass, and there’s always that one person who flips the first page before every else.

Now, I have mixed feelings about that person; and don’t tell me that you don’t know what I’m talking about, because every testing room has one. See, that person means different things depending on their grade and intelligence level.

In middle school, the First Page Flipper was the smartest person in the class. It meant that they Knew Their Shit. They’d turn in their test first and get an A, and everyone looked up to them in terms of intelligence.

In high school, that person’s a little different, because that flipper is either a genius of a certifiable idiot. Let me explain. (Heh, Kevin Hart. I watched his special today. Remember what I said about originality and other influences?)

If the flipper is the genius, then one can generally apply the formula from the middle school situation and get a reasonably accurate assessment. The kicker is when the person is incredibly stupid.

Now, before I tell the story of J, I need to put a disclaimer: this is humor. I have nothing against and understand that some people have lower intelligence than others. It’s the people who actively choose to be idiotic that I mock.

Onto J. I’m going to use J as a model for everything stupid in my life. It’s well deserved, I assure you.

J _is_ of reasonable intelligence; it’s just that he either lost all of his motivation between sophomore and junior year or got kicked in the head by a particularly muscular breed of equine.

I currently take a college-level chemistry course. It’s very difficult, and both the teacher and I are equally incompetent in teaching and the class, respectively.

The problem is that J decided to take the class as well. The class is very small: out of the entire school, there are only ten people in one class. The ten of us have a fantastic time failing all the tests together, but what we all bond over is laughing over J’s stupidity.

Now, that might sound mean, but remember that we all had a relatively open mind to him at the beginning of the year. Let me give you some examples of why my opinion of him is in the gutter:

  1. We have a lab once a week, and every quarter of the school year we get randomly chosen partners. In the second quarter, the dice rolled unfavorably for me.



Not only did I have to do the entire lab report plus the calculation by myself, but I also had to conduct the entire college-level experiment. That went just as well for me that quarter as you’d expect-- me, who desperately needed a competent partner to cover my ass due to my test grades.

One time, I was running around and the clock was ticking towards the end of the period, so I said to J, “Can you go out and measure 5.00 grams of this powder for me on the mass scale?”

It was a simple task. You put the container on the scale, zero it out, and weigh until the desired number. I sent J and ten minutes passed. Eventually, I looked over and saw him standing by the scale and aimlessly stabbing at the powder in the container with a plastic spoon, so I walked over.

“What’s taking so long?”

It turned out that J did not know how to operate a scale nor measure out a certain mass of powder. Suffice to say, I did the rest of the labs alone.

  1. Before a test, J was talking about how he was going to fail the next test. But that’s okay, he said, “Because Imma gonna drink two red bulls and stay up for an all-nighter.”



“Why not actually study for the test beforehand?” we asked him, horrified.

“Nah,” he said, and that was the end of the discussion for him, even though the entire class looked around incredulously at each other, like, ‘Can you believe this guy?’

Even the teacher joined in. “J, that’s not how you do it.”

“I’m dumber than I was last year,” J said, and that was that.

That’s the end of the J stories for now. I have another delightful anecdote about how he shattered our experiment that took me an hour and a half to concoct, but that's for another time.

I’m going way back again to the Page Flipper, the person who finishes the test first. I used J as an example of a dumbass and then got sidetracked. He handed in his test twenty minutes early and everyone knew which type he was. (I’m still bitter because of the shattered experiment.) Anyway.

In the case of my math midterm, which was what I was talking about a million years earlier, that person, that Page Flipper, was me.

The midterm was very difficult, which was no surprise, thanks for asking.

What was surprising was that I got a perfect score on it.

Let’s flash back. I’m in the testing room, and I’m nauseous and sick but required to take the midterm. The test starts. The room is hot and cramped and someone is sniffling and I hear people frantically typing on their calculators, and pencils scratching on lined sheets of paper as students attempt to invent a new form of math, hopefully one that’ll provide an answer that is closest to one of the five answer choices listed on the Scantron sheet.

‘Let’s see,’ I swear I heard someone thinking. ‘If I could 2,675 square feet but the answers provided are 56, 110, 2000, 6578, and 1,000,000, I’m going to pick ‘C’ because my answer is closest to that. Also, always pick ‘C’ when uncertain.’

‘Dumbass,’ I thought, while circling my own answer that was closest to the answers provided.

I finished the problems on that first page, flipped it, and froze. Oh, no. _I_ was the Page Flipper.

What’s worse is that the midterm was split into two parts. I finished Part One before anyone else. The thing about this midterm is that this was the calculator portion, and you had to hand Part One in to receive Part Two. I was ready to move on. The problem was that nobody else was.

When you stand up and hand it in at the front of the room, it’s just that much more obvious. Everyone can see the Page Flipper. As I got up, I felt everyone’s eyes on me, judging. ‘Genius or Dumbass?’

Curse them. I had no idea which one I was in regards to the midterm.

As I got to the end of Part Two, I legitimately forgot how to multiply numbers without a calculator. In one free response question, I just wrote a number because it ‘seemed right’ and it ‘was the one that popped into my head.’

That ‘random number’ was correct. Go figure.

It’s about two weeks later, and we’re getting back the midterm in class. I’m shaking because I have a major anxiety problem and the midterm was really hard and oh fuck what if I didn’t get a good grade I’d be so ashamed of myself and I’d be a failure and what would that mean for my GPA and my successes in other classes and the course of my entire life--

Like that. So when I got the test back and saw the perfect score, a single tear may have been shed.

All of this background isn’t important, but I enjoy setting the scene.

Speaking of setting the scene, let me describe myself in case I haven’t done so before and you haven’t picked it up through indirect characterization.

I’m simultaneously a nerd and a geek. I have thick glasses because otherwise I can’t see shit, and I’d like to be able to see everything that happens so I can analyze it and giggle later. I’m a creature of habit, and I like to wear the same few clothes over and over. This combination doesn’t do wonders for my social standing among my peers.

I’m socially awkward and extremely introverted, but I would die for the few friends I have, and hopefully they’d do the same for me. I’m objectively bright and a good student, so teachers trust me. This is all essential for this story.

I’m sitting in this math class, at the four-person table bunched around and scattered around the room. My sophomore basketball friend-- yes, I have some jock friends, they’re secretly nerds too-- and two freshmen are there with me.

It’s the middle of class, and the teacher, who we’ll call Mr. Fun (the nickname is a pun), is walking around the room, lecturing as one does when they’re doing their job. Or supposed to do; some teachers are surprisingly incompetent. One almost thinks that they… don’t like their jobs. Shocking.

Anyway, the teacher’s making his rounds, when suddenly he stops, and an expression that I can only describe as supreme discomfort spreads across his face.

It’s worth interjecting that Mr. Fun’s one of the chillest-- sorry, _most chill--_ teachers in the school. His class is mostly him putting a problem up on the board and letting the students collaborate on solving it. He’s a jock and teaches said friend’s basketball team. Some examples of his chillness:

  1. He played March Madness of his computer during class in the background, since both he and some of the students wanted to keep up with it, and the site was blocked on the school provided computers.
  2. He provided extra credit when either attending the school’s basketball games or doing a worksheet the day of it. Safe to say, in the third quarter that the entire class the entire class’s grades were significantly higher.



So he’s chill. He likes me, as much as a teacher can like a student that sits quietly, does their work, and scores well on tests.

On that fateful day, when he was walking around and suddenly went white, he had every reason to be shaken, or as we say as the Gen Z generation, shooketh.

On the white and tiled floor of the school, there rested a square white packet with writing on it, the size of a single condom packet.

In retrospect, there was nothing that indicated that the packet wasn’t what the teacher thought it was, but there was nothing that didn’t, you know?

Oh, an important fact about me: I’m gay. Combined with the fact that I’m an antisocial nerd, there was absolutely no logical why I should have owned a condom packet. There was virtually no chance of me getting a girl pregnant, gregnant, or any variation thereof.

So when I, along with the rest of the class, bent sideways out of our chairs to scrutinize the offending packet on the floor, I was supremely confident that I had no connection to this whatsoever.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was mine.

See, I told you before that I have glasses. A little known fact about glasses is that when they get smudged or dirty, it’s as hard as shit to get them off. Therefore, I had bought an industrial size box of glasses cleaning alcoholic wipes and became in the habit of keeping a few in my backpack’s pocket.

Unfortunately, that was the same pocket I kept my calculator in, and as you might remember, it was math class. When I had taken my calculator, the packet had most likely fallen out.

The fact that saved both my ass and my dignity was that someone had walked by and accidentally kicked the offending packet far away from my desk, so it laid sadly on the floor in No Man’s Land, a space in the middle of the class with no desk clumps.

There was no evidence connecting it to me to the dirty little packet on the floor. But imagine my surprise when I saw it. It was more resignation, though, like a _Hey, you,_ instead of a _Hey, you!_

Poor Mr. Fun was running through several hues of the color spectrum, and he probably thought something along the lines of, ‘Holy shit, one of my idiot students brought a condom into my fucking classroom. I don’t remember the school handbook covering this.’

He walked over to it as the class silently followed him with our collective eyes. I felt like a criminal. He nudged it with his foot, a grimace on his face.

Suddenly, it cleared as he read the packaging that identified them as Alcoholic Glasses Wipes. Not Trojan. Not… I don’t know, I’m not familiar with condom brand names.

“Never mind,” he said, walking away from it like it had set fire to his car and come to his house for sweet sweet revenge, yet shoulders visibly slumping in relief (or maybe that’s what it seemed to me, who was guilty), “it wasn’t what I thought it was.” And, under his breath, “Thank fucking god.”

Poor Mr. Fun. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had actually brought a condom packet to school? Would they have interrogated the entire class, lined us up in an interrogation room? Detention? Public humiliation?

He wouldn’t have thought it was me. Remember the whole nerdy virgin vibe I give off? That’s helpful for me in situations such as those. Not so handy in other situations.

But that’s always been my little secret. I bet the entire class still thinks that it was a condom, and Mr. Fun was just trying to avoid both the awkward situation and the disciplinary action that would have inevitably followed.

I wear contacts a lot more now. I passed by him the other day in the hallway and said hello. I wonder if he remembers the Incident. I wonder if he ever realized that it was my ‘condom’ packet.

But I knew. And I know.

VintageAdage out.

* * *

 

Jeremy opened his eyes and tapped the mouse, waking up his computer and pausing the video before it autoplayed to the next one.

A smile touched his lips. He had a single notification, that bubbled red 1 in the top right corner of his screen.

_VintageAdage liked your comment. (5 minutes ago.)_

Jeremy leaned back in his swivel chair, a content sigh escaping his lips, and daydreamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I was being mean about J, but you'd have to see him in person to believe me. Michael has zero tolerance for those who adamantly dig in their heels and refuse to help themselves.  
> I think I closed off the scene sweetly. Thoughts?
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	4. Let's Begin!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because I'm the weirdo that illustrates her own fics. 3.25.19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was feeling that itch to draw and had no homework today. I love the reception that I'm receiving for this fic, so I'm posting it as a pseudo-chapter.  
> Trouble viewing? If you scroll/move the mouse/touchpad to the right, you'll see the entire picture. Or just ctrl+ or ctrl- your screen, whatever works best.

My fanart!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I learned to draw hands, finally :)


	5. Amaglamation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have 20k of bits on a document that I recently discovered, so I've started using some of the better ones. 4.7.19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It amuses me to no end that when I update things a substantial amount of people get sent emails. I should not have this much power.

 It was the end of a school today, and the two boys sat in Michael’s beloved PT Cruiser as he drove him. Jeremy, terrified in equal amounts of the dilapidated car and Michael’s driving, clung to the handle above the window. In contrast to his imminent death, the song [“No One’s Gonna Love You”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_I4lZ3IqxU) by Band of Horses played on the radio.

“If someone told me they liked me,” said Jeremy, because making conversation distracted him from the overwhelming sense of fear, “I’d probably look at them incredulously and say, ‘Why?’”

“Honestly, I’d just be glad that they liked me that way,” Michael said. “And hey. Don’t talk mean like that-- sorry, no more musical references-- don’t talk bad about yourself.”

Jeremy cracked a smile. “Don’t worry, Michael. It’s just a joke I saw on Tumblr.”

“Okay,” Michael said. “That’s good. ‘Cause I’d hate to have to explain to you that you are smart enough, good enough, and god damn it, people like you.”

“But you did it anyway,” Jeremy smiled, “and quoted a self-help book while you were at it.”

“Wait, it’s a self-help book?” Michael furrowed his eyebrows. “I saw that in Sinfest.”

Now it was Jeremy’s turn to look confused. “Sinfest? Is that some porn magazine or something?”

Michael choked. “No. God, no. It’s a comic strip drawn by Tatsuya Ishida. I think it’s just titled that way because it discusses a lot of mature topics.”

“Is it any good?”

“It used to be. A lot of readers who have followed it since it started (in the 2000s, maybe?) dislike the strip because, and there’s really no nice way to say it, it started turning to shit.

“It used to be a witty, honest comic about life with relatable characters. Now it’s just become feminist propaganda. Not that feminism is bad, of course. But a lot of the characters were taken out and replaced with two-dimensional characters, and the plot became dull and unengaging.

“Oh, shit, I’m talking too much again! I told you to stop me when I do that-- you know I can talk forever!”

“Nah. I like when you get excited.” A soft smile touched the corners of Jeremy’s mouth. “Your face kind of… lights up. It’s cute-- I mean, no homo.”

“Of course. No homo.” And then they fist-bumped to ensure their masculinity.

* * *

 

This is the last bit of my very first special,  _ Cooler than a Vintage Cassette. _ I have a bunch of little unrelated stories for you, lines and jokes and such. The bit’s called _Amalgamation._ It’s going to be rapid, vapid, and disorgani zed. You’re going to love it.

Here’s one!

 

I don’t even try to make excuses anymore. This is an actual conversation between me and a person today as we’re walking in the hallway towards homeroom. 

“Do you want to come with me to the school library to print something?”

“I can’t,” I say, “I have to, uh, do things.” And then I walked away. Yeah, I just walked away. I didn’t even say goodbye.

I did not have to ‘do things.’ I had no things ‘to do.’ I just wanted out of the situation.

So if I say that to you, ever, then know that I might actually have things to do, or I’m trying to escape talking to you. It’s your guess which is which: each is equally likely.

_ Honey! _

“Oh, shit, that’s my mother.”

_ Honey, dinner is ready! _

“Can’t, mom, I have to… do things. Super important. Can’t leave.”

So like that.

 

It always amuses me when people abbreviate words in real life. For example, lol or fml. Bitch, what do you do with all that extra time?

One particular phrase that annoys me is ‘slow-mo.’ I’m not saying that the rhyme was unintentional, but something definitely happened between ‘mo’ and ‘tion.’

Picture the two people in charge of movies. One of them says, “Bill. Hey, hey Bill.” And he shoves Bill, like  _ this. _ “We need something to make the scene more dramatic.”

And Bill says to him, “How about, you know, making, you know, time slow down.”

Jeff the Redneck (that’s an allusion to Jeff Foxworthy) looks at him for two seconds in complete silence. Then: “That. Is. Genius!”

Just then, the roof collapsed on the two men, because only men could come up with an idea that idiotic, and if one of the people saw the roof beam hurtling towards them in slow-mo--  _ not _ slow motion-- all the better for this story.

 

I don’t write down embarrassing memories because I don’t see that point of remembering them. What’s done is done, and I’ll try to watch my mouth more. There’s no point in cringing and feeling terrible about myself at something I said some time ago.

That said, I wrote down one my moments of shame.

A few weeks ago, I’m sitting in Spanish class silently because I am in a completely different class than the rest of the people. We’re in the same class, but we’re not in the same class. Social popularity. I’m funny, shut up.

Almost exactly a week ago, the insane teacher told us to write a skit. 

I ended up getting a hundred percent on that, a 25 out of 25. I come in on Monday in a happy mood. I had no tests earlier that day, so I’m naturally running on minimum sleep. I’m all zonked out for the day, and for those of you that don’t know what it means-- I don’t know either.

The person next to me is studiously copying down the homework in her agenda book, the school notebooks that they hand to us at the beginning of the year in the hopes that we’ll be more ‘responsible,’ whatever that mean, and she’s not talking, so I turn to the sophomore boy in front of me. Amy, the person next to me, myself, and the two people up front were all in the same group because that way it was the easiest for Sra. to split us up.

“Hey,” I say, “what’d you get on the presentation?”

“A hundred,” he says, because this was a group presentation and we should all have gotten the same grade. “What about you?”

“Un hundo,” I answer, and Agenda Girl next to me nods to indicate that yes, she had received the same. I voiced my sentiment above. “Didn’t we all get the same grade?”

The fourth member of our group, I don’t remember her name but let’s dub her Sharon, kinda looks at me, and she’s either constipated or trying to keep her face carefully blank. Now, I’m not good at reading social cues. In my sleep-deprived brain, I realize that she probably did not get a good grade. I flash back to a previous class skit.

In the skit, the class idiot got up at the front of the class, stood there, mouth gaping and eyes wide because the dumbass had completely forgotten his lines.

So I say, and I see myself say it (in slow-mo, not slow-motion), “You’d have to have messed up really bad to get a lower grade.”

As I’m flashing back, I wince, because what I intend to convey is never what I get across. I also notice the boy in front of me looking panicked, glancing towards me, towards her, and towards me again. If he could have made the throat-cutting sign with his hand without being obvious, he would have done so already.

The girl that I’m talking to looks hurt, so I hastily say, “I mean, you probably messed up some grammar, something minor--” then, realizing I made the situation worse, “What did you get, anyway?”

“A 24.5 out of 25.”

“Oh,” I say, relieved, “that’s not bad at all. You definitely just messed up something small. Jeez, I was thinking a 23/25. You scared me.”

“That’s not bad,” the girl next to me said, so in my mind, I said in a nasally, childish voice, _ Shut up, Amy. No one wants your opinion, _ because I hate when I’m wrong and they’re right and they correct me, ‘cause at that point, I’m invested in my point, and I can’t suddenly just abandon it in favor of, what? Accuracy? Unrealistic. Blocked.

Some politicians also use my method of dealing with things, so either I’m a genius or something needs to change.

 

Speaking of genius, of which I am not, I have quite a few quirks. I use proper punctuation all of the time. If I use proper punctuation with you, there are three reasons:

  1. You’re my immediate superior.
  2. I respect you.
  3. I want to intimidate you.



Have fun knowing which is which!

 

I went to see John Mulaney not too long ago in March. I always say both his first and last name. Not John. Not Mulaney. John Mulaney. Don’t know me why. He was going around with Pete Davidson and some dude named Ricky. Ricky was actually funny, but I don’t have his last name to advertise. 

I’m not a huge Pete Davidson fan, and neither are my parents. I don’t think he has good content, and my mother thinks he curses needlessly. We are, however, all Mulaney nuts. Nuts for Mulaney. Coocoo for coconuts.

I’m so tired.

Anyway, here’s a few bits that emerged from that outing.

 

Me: The only thing that could ruin this perfect night is if Pete Davidson explicitly talked about sex, because my parents are here with me.

Pete, humping the air: So how the fuck do you make a woman come after four strokes?

Me, my face in my hands: How the fuck indeed.

 

This is a day after the show, and we moved the clock forward an hour.

Me: I got an hour stolen from me!

Mom: Who, John Mulaney? 

Me: No, John Mulaney added ten years to my lifespan. I meant Daylight Savings.

 

After seeing John Mulaney live, I realized that he physically jumps around on stage a lot more than he did on his specials. He did everything from (multiple) vertical jumps to curling up on the floor. Pete Davidson made fun of him for the last one.

They came out onstage at the end of the show and basically did impressions of each other. I forget what Mulaney did for Pete, probably acted like a juvenile delinquent, but Pete’s impression of him had me in stitches. Peter stood up straight, and said, “I’m John Mulaney, and this is all I talk about. Wife wife wife, Petunia Petunia Petunia.” 

That is absolutely true. Go, Pete.

 

One last Mulaney related bit. If you ever feel bad about being oblivious, remember that I didn’t find out that my younger brother (an unknown fact about me, surprise!) had a girlfriend until two days after they got together.

The great part is that I didn’t believe them at first. I knew my brother was friends with many girls, but he’s a seventh grader and they are all eighth graders, and does not have the caste minimum or the social etiquette to date one of them. 

We’re eating dinner together, and this story is absolutely true. We’re sitting at the table, I’ve zoned out as usual, and suddenly I tune in to hear my brother say, “... the people on my bus keep asking me if I have an eighth grade girlfriend--”

I interrupt him, laughing because I knew it was false. “And you told them no, right?”

My brother and mother just kinda look at me weirdly. “No.”

Still chuckling, I say, “What idiots. He doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”

“Actually…” my brother says.

When I finally believed them, the first thing I said was, “Why?”

That would’ve been fine on its own, but the only thing going through my head was Mulaney saying,  _ “Why? _ Why are you doing this?” 

It turned out that they ‘got together’ and started dating on Tuesday. The day the conversation happened was on Thursday. Two whole days went by in my household before I came across the fact that my younger brother was no longer single.

 

Let’s talk about me being oblivious some more. Here’s a prime-time example.

My family is on vacation. For some reason, my moms decided we could go to iHop for breakfast, even though they declared war against every and all junk food a decade previous, much to my eternal chagrin.

I should note that I, like always, was very tired. We sat down at our table and ate our pancakes. They were good, but I’m not going to give you elaborate descriptions of them like their mouth-watering smells or the feeling of chocolate chips melting on your tongue, because then I’ll get hangry.

Hangry is a combination of the words ‘hungry’ and ‘angry.’ It’s a severe condition and I, tragically, am one of the millions affected. Symptoms are irritability, shouting, and grabbing the bag of potato chips, running to your room, and slamming the door as hard a possible.

When we finished the meal, the children (a classification that includes me) announced that we had to go to the bathroom, so we went on a biblical exodus to the public restroom that smelled of an odd mixture between piss and synthetic maple syrup. 

I should probably include the detail that I have two little brothers. My two moms must have had a field day that they realized that they’d never have a girl unless they adopted a fourth child.

My two brother, my mothers, and I went to the bathroom together. My mom and I were talking, so I didn’t realize that they entered the girl’s bathroom until I spotted all the excess space and, hey, the absence of urinals. Basically, I took a step inside, turned around 180 degrees, and fucked right off and out of the bathroom.

My brothers, who went to the bathroom that identified with their own gender, almost pissed themselves laughing. Hooray.

 

Here’s my last bit.

Now, I’m your average Joe Brown in literally any other way, but I have recently found out that I was racist.

(If I was performing this live, and the crowd goes silent, I would play  _ Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist _ in the Background.)

Oh, you all don’t like that very much. And I agree. Racism’s a bad thing. A very bad thing.

Just to clarify (and so I don’t get sued), it’s not  _ actual _ racism. It’s just the assumptions that you make based on race. Like when you see an Asian kid with a violin and go, oooh, they must be forced to do that by their parents, and to be honest, they’d probably be right. 

So that kind of casual racism. It’s obviously wrong and detrimental to society, but it can be humorous in the right situations.

For example, in high school I was an officer of my Spanish Club. I took Spanish in school, and I needed extracurriculars, so I was like, “Food?  _ Free _ food? Sign me up!” And somehow I became the communications directors or some shit like that. It was something to do with publicity. You can see how much I cared about the responsibility.

May I point out the irony of an extremely antisocial kid being elected the head of talking to people, and even more ironic than that is the fact that I’m a Filipino masquerading as a Hispanic, all for the sake of tortilla chips? 

But it doesn’t really matter. What  _ did _ matter is this job forced me to create flyers and staple them around the school. I’d be dismissed from seventh period and I’d wander the halls around with a stack of flyers and a staple gun, and nobody would give me a second glance. High school is great.

I’d always to do these flyers five minutes before I handed them in because I didn’t care at all about them, and I mean  _ at all. _ However, I always put in a border made of pictures, just so it’d look like I tried. 

Making the flyers last minute was difficult because I’d have no idea what to do. I’d ask myself, what makes a Spaniard a Spaniard? And instantly, many politically incorrect answers came right up.

So for the month of September, the border of pictures was sombreros. October: burritos. November: tacos. You can see where this is going. But just picture a sophomore boy in high school opening up a powerpoint, searching up enchiladas or some shit, and then pasting about fifty of them into a powerpoint and labeling it SPANISH CLUB in a big bolded font. 

That’s white supremacy and ignorance for you!

I always felt bad, because people who speak Spanish have different and unique cultures that should be respected and everything, but when I looked at the flyers of the poor schmuck who did it last year, I saw that he did the exact same thing.

In the end, we are all exactly the same.

 

Sometimes, the show must end. And as I wind down tonight, I thought of a little rhyme to commemorate the occasion.

_ Who said we were finished? Who said we were done?  _

_ Who said this was over, now that this has begun? _

I can sit here and pretend to be who I’m not. I can mimic other things people wrote, people better and smarter and more capable than I am. I can plagiarize and make money off of unsuspecting audiences and if I take the jokes from obscure enough comedians, maybe I’ll get away with it.

But I don’t want to, and here’s why. Because if I’m someone else, then I won’t be who I am. And that sounds so stupid when I say it out loud, but I think it touches upon the essence of who I am.

As a comedian, you throw situations upon other people, smile at them and say, “Did this ever happen to you? Can you relate to this?” and if they don’t laugh, you scrap the joke. I think the same reasoning applies to real life. If you do something and someone vehemently disapproves, chances are you won’t do the thing again.

For a totally example, say that you really enjoyed those DHMIS videos in middle school. Like, you were really passionate. You watched all of the videos multiple times and memorized the lyrics. You constructed conspiracy theories and watched Youtube videos that discussed some ideas that you have and some that you didn’t.

Through that passion, you read some fanfiction. Granted, it was really shitty fanfiction. But it made you feel good, provided a feeling of togetherness and camaraderie: proof that you weren’t the only one that enjoyed this obscure piece of media.

Through that passion, you started drawing pieces and finishing them. You looked up anatomy, researched expressions and drawing tips. You practiced those drawings in that red hardcover sketchbook that you hadn’t touched since second grade, and when you flip through it, you see little scribbles and jokes that you wrote down and forgot about.

Through that passion, you found some online communities. Learned that there was this whole other world out there of the arts, people who joked and sculpted and drew and created for a living.

But not once did you share this new undiscovered side of you, this aspect that you buffed and shined through continuous use.

People ask me, “What do you do with your time?” and I always get nervous, because even though I’m constantly making things, I’m hesitant to share.

The thing is, I’m not scared about the quality of the work, because I could care less about that. If I tried,  _ really _ tried, I am happy with it-- because I am always on the constant path of improvement. 

Because being an artist… being an artist is about creating. Whether you’re a writer or a painter or even an architect, you are constantly making things. You can’t just make one thing and stagnate, because you aren’t Harper Lee, an author that releases a single book that becomes a classic work of American literature.

And the worst thing about disapproval, the  _ worst _ thing about disapproval, is that it decreases to do the desire to do what you love. It doesn’t matter whether the videos that the middle schooler watched were shit, or if they were the fucking Mona Lisa of American puppetry.

Because what if that little seventh grader was destined to become the next great comedian because they liked the characters and the funny songs and wanted to write a satire of their own featuring new situations? And if a bully marches down the hallway and snatches the idea notebook out of the little nerd’s hands, takes a picture of it and posts it on Instagram for everyone to laugh at, isn’t there a possibility that one night the nerd looks at the notebook, sighs sadly, and throws it in the trash, never to be seen again?

A slight detour. I’m in high school, spoiler alert, and my little brother, who is in middle school, comes home one night after auditioning for the school play. He tells a story about how some class idiot took a video of some of the kids’ auditions and put them online. The kicker was that he only videotaped the bad ones. Picture this little shit of a kid sitting there in the audience, looking at all the auditionees with a grin on his face, and as soon as someone stumbles over a lyric, whips out his iPhone and starts recording.

How fucking up is that? It doesn’t matter if one of the kids is going to be the lead in a musical someday. Even if it’s just for two months in middle school, let the kids do something that they enjoy.

Just imagine little Sam, all hyped up on post-audition endorphins, going home and saying, “I think I aced it!” in a squeaky little pre-pubescent voice, and then having one of their friends text them, ‘Look on Instagram.’ Sam watches the video, and her little face falls with disappointment and embarrassment, because one of her most vulnerable moments is out there, and what’s worse-- people are laughing at it. At her.

Do you think little Sam is going to audition next year?

I deviated. We were talking indirectly and me and DHMIS, which you really should check out if you like singing, puppets, and gore.

I really liked DHMIS in middle school. Looking back, it was cringy. I know it now, I knew it then. But my point, the essential point I’m trying to make, is that none of  _ this, _ and I’m gesturing at the microphone and my notes, would be happened if someone sauntered up to me with my notebooks and said, “That’s stupid. Get a life.”

I like to think that I’m relatively unconcerned when faced with hate, but the truth is we never know how we’re going to react until we’re faced with the situation. Now that I’m recording these ‘specials,’ I’ll probably do something or say something that offends someone, even if I say it in jest. You just can’t make everyone happy, and no one is a perfect person all of the time.

Now, I’m unaffected by all that. What I am affected by, though, is when this happens to someone else. Too many times I have heard someone voice their opinion or a creative idea and get shot down with an unapologetic ‘no.’ And I see their face fall, and their shoulders hunch, and for a second I see that small seventh grader with the red sketchbook in them, and I want to reach out for their hand and say, “Don’t listen to them,” but sometimes I just can’t, because I’m either too far away or it's none of my business or I just find my throat closing up.

It breaks my heart  _ every single time _ when I see that candle and its bright flame being extinguished. So be kind. 

Be kind for them. Be kind for you. Or, if nothing else, be kind for me.

Adage out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make my day and kudos make the world go round.

**Author's Note:**

> _I can be your melody_   
>  _Oh, girl, I could write you a symphony_   
>  _The one that could fill your fantasies_   
>  _So come, baby girl, let's sing with me_
> 
> _Shawty's like a melody in my head_  
>  _That I can't keep out_  
>  _Got me singin' like_  
>  _Na na na na everyday_  
>  _It's like my iPod stuck on replay, replay._
> 
>    
> My tumblr is mermaidmayonnaise if you want to drop by and ask me why John Mulaney is my husband.  
> 


End file.
